Tag: Confederate flag

Categories
Music Music Blog

Blues Foundation Rescinds Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s BMA Nomination

Kenny Wayne Shepherd (courtesy Prospect PR)

With the rise of white supremacist movements worldwide, the Confederate flag can no longer pass as the nod-and-wink signifier of Southern pride that it once was. That’s what guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd has discovered, as his love of that iconic image, plastered on his guitars and his car, has caused him to lose his 2021 Blues Music Awards (BMA) nomination for Best Blues/Rock Artist.

The Blues Foundation, which hosts and organizes the BMAs, first posted a Statement Against Racism last Monday, which states that the organization “unequivocally condemns all forms and expressions of racism, including all symbols associated with white supremacy and the degradation of people of color. We will hold ourselves as well as all blues musicians, fans, organizations, and members of the music industry accountable for racist actions and encourage concrete commitments to acknowledge and redress the resulting pain.”

Three days later, the organization announced that Shepherd’s nomination had been rescinded, noting in a statement that “The decision to rescind the nomination was based upon continuing revelations of representations of the Confederate flag on Shepherd’s ‘General Lee’ car, guitars and elsewhere.  The Blues Foundation has also asked Ken Shepherd, father of Kenny Wayne Shepherd, to step down as a member of its Board of Directors.  The Blues Foundation states that it is resolute in its commitment to purposefully address racism and contribute to a more equitable blues community.”

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that Shepherd had issued an apology, noting that “The foundation says Shepherd has used the Confederate flag on his ‘General Lee’ replica car from ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ and on his guitars. Shepherd says in a statement he put the car in permanent storage years ago, and had painted over the Confederate flag some time ago. He does not mention the guitars. Shepherd says he has always opposed racism and oppression.”

As reported by Variety, “The moves followed statements from prominent figures in the blues community who indicated they planned to dissociate themselves from the organization because of the kudos this year for Shepherd, a previous Blues Awards winner. Muddy Waters’ daughter, Mercy Morganfield, had said she was resigning from the board because of the support for Shepherd.”

Morganfield had made a Facebook post about the matter titled “The Way My Daddy Looks At a White Man Winning a Blues Foundation Music Award While Waving A F****g Confederate Flag.” Her post has since been deleted.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Feeling Southern

CREDIT: Msheldrake | Dreamstime.com

Msheldrake | Dreamstime.com

banana pudding

I’m Southern. I mean, I’m Southern! I don’t have blood. My veins are filled with grits and butter. With the exception of a Norway-born great-grandfather, all branches of my family tree have lived in the Southern United States since at least the 18th century. Most since the 17th.

Am I proud of this? Sure, I guess. I didn’t have anything to do with where they decided to put down roots, but I suppose my decision to stay in the South is continuing a legacy that goes back just about as far as any American immigrant’s legacy can go.

Maybe y’all have heard about this here flag controversy? You know the one where we talk about a piece of fabric instead of focusing on the real issue? IT’S HATE!! NO, IT’S HERITAGE!! No, it’s a battle flag you’re talking about, most of the time, so unless you’re fixin’ to storm my rancher and take my Maw Maw’s silver and my six-pack of ramen noodles, I think that flag does not mean what you think it means.

I’ve been thinking about ways Southerners — of all shapes, colors, funny accents, and opinions on pimento cheese recipes — can celebrate our Southern heritage without use of a flag. For example, I think we can all agree that football was invented by God to make us happy. I think we can all agree that even if we don’t all believe in God, we understand the point I’m trying to get across and will not argue theology when we could use that energy arguing about who’s going to win the Egg Bowl.

A great thing about American Southerners is that we can find something in common with any other Southerner from any country. That’s something to be proud of. It generally involves food. We all tend to like spicy foods. I once worked with several women from different countries, but we were all “Southerners.” We decided to do a potluck where we would bring foods that we grew up on. I was at a slight disadvantage as two of the ladies did not eat pork. Do you know how hard it is to make ANYTHING a Mississippian ate growing up that doesn’t have at least some part of a pig in it? I made banana pudding. Southerners always have backup plans. That’s heritage right there, buddy ro. I have come up with a few other ways we can celebrate being Southern without being asshats about it.

Make sure all your dogs are under the front porch.

Drink more mint juleps.

Use the good silver and china at least once a week.

DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, TELL A YANKEE WHAT “BLESS YOUR HEART” REALLY MEANS. They may figure it out. It’s not your fault. They are wily foes.

Develop strong opinions on the proper way to make deviled eggs, pimento cheese, and bean salad.

Have at least two church cookbooks. (Extra points if they were passed down to you.)

Call fireflies “lightning bugs” like a civilized person.

Wear a seersucker suit.

Make a Jell-O salad with marshmallows and then give it away, because that stuff is rank.

Distinguish different generations with the same name by referring to them as “Big” or “Little.”

Keep at least three funeral casseroles or cakes in your freezer at all times.

Monogram anything that will sit still long enough.

Stop pressing buttons and start mashing them.

I think the best way to celebrate our heritage is to take advantage of our colorful way of speaking. Don’t hide your accent. Parade it around on the front porch. After I told my husband I was hungry enough to eat the ass outta low-flying duck, I asked friends for some other phrases we could use to celebrate our way with words. Butts figured prominently, as in “that ass looks like two raccoons fighting in a burlap sack” and “her butt’s lumpier than a bad batch of gravy.”

Our ways of saying someone is not very pretty are also awesome. Ugly as a mud fence. So homely she’d scare a freight train down a dirt road.

We all know people crazier than a sprayed cockroach or crazier than a sack of bees. We’ve all eaten fried chicken good enough to make you slap yer mama or make a puppy pull a freight train.

We have some amazing things to celebrate about the South. We are authors, painters, potters, actors, statesmen, educators, musicians. We’re storytellers. I think maybe that’s what gets us in trouble. When it’s our story, we tell it the way we want to. We’re more than a flag. Let’s start acting like it.

Susan Wilson also writes for yeahandanotherthing.com and likethedew.com and. She and her husband Chuck have lived here long enough to know that Midtown does not start at Highland.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Old Times There Are Not Forgotten …

CREDIT: Jefferson Davis statue in Memphis

Jefferson Davis statue in Memphis

The U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, but there are many who will tell you that we’re still fighting it and will find evidence of such in Jackson Baker’s cover story about the current battle over General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s statue and gravesite in Memphis.

But the truth is we’re not really still fighting the Civil War of the 1860s; we’re still fighting the “Civil Rights War” of the 1960s.

That’s when all this passion for history and the “Southern way of life” really took off. That’s when there was a huge surge in Confederate park-naming, Confederate hero statue-building, and Confederate flag-raisings over public buildings. The South wasn’t rising again; the defense of racism was rising, under the guise of “heritage.”

In 1964, as civil rights protests and marches were occurring all over the South, Memphis erected a statue of Jefferson Davis downtown. Coincidence? Sure, it was. Oddly, that same coincidence happened in all 11 former Confederate states in the 1960s, as white folks below the Mason-Dixon line rallied around the flag, so to speak, and erected dozens of new historical odes to the Confederacy on public property.

In Mississippi, Governor Ross Barnett famously said ending segregation would be to “drink from the cup of genocide,” and at an Ole Miss football game in 1962 said, “I love Mississippi. I love her people, our customs. I love and respect our heritage.” The crowd was a sea of waving Confederate battle flags. The following week saw riots on campus as whites attacked federal marshalls seeking to integrate the university. To protect Southern customs and heritage, of course.

There are more Civil War historical monuments in the South than monuments to all other wars in U.S. history combined. They dot the landscape like magnolias, populating our parks and city squares, persistent reminders of the ill-fated and bloody attempt to leave the United States and preserve the institution of slavery. Yes, many Confederate soldiers were brave and heroic. And yes, many Southern generals were brilliant tacticians and dashing warriors. But the cause was not noble or glorious. And we’re still paying the price for it.

Still, this is a free country. No one will stop you from flying any flag you choose on your property. No one will begrudge you your right to dress up and reenact glorious — if bloodless — scenes of epic battle. If you want to put the Confederate flag on your bumper or wear it on your T-shirt, go for it. It says more about you than you think.

But if you’ve got a free day and you want to learn something that might alter your perspective, go down to South Main Street and visit the National Civil Rights Museum. The whole, sad, ugly, embarrassing history of Southern racism and the battle for civil rights — the marches, the freedom rides, the burned buses, the murders, the lynchings, the police dogs, the fire hoses, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the church bombings, the forced school integration, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King — is there. Go see it. Take it in. Let the ignorance and the hate and the horror wash over you.

When you walk out, maybe you won’t be as eager to wave that battle flag. Maybe you’ll even begin to understand why one man’s glorious heritage is another man’s living hell.

Categories
News News Feature

Committed to Lies

People in search of comfort may turn to scripture after last week’s massacre of nine black churchgoers by a lone white gunman in Charleston, South Carolina. I am drawn to John 8:32, in which Jesus tells his disciples: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Emancipation by veracity is a beautiful, if elusive, concept. It puts freedom within anyone’s reach. But this nation is committed to lies, never more so than when it comes to racism.

Confessed killer Dylann Roof explained his racist motivations in an online manifesto. In it, he calls black people violent and inferior. He says the authors of slave narratives spoke highly of the institution. He writes that integration sent white people running to the suburbs in search of whiter schools and fewer minorities.

If racism is a continuum, Roof is at the far right end. America’s systems and institutions — all of them — are not as far to the left as we tell ourselves. Typing that — being honest — fills me with anxiety. To state unflinchingly, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did, that America is racist is to open yourself up to attack.

The (direct or indirect) beneficiaries of racist systems have a powerful incentive to be dishonest. So they lie and insist that racism doesn’t exist. How do they lie? Let’s count just a few of the ways.

They lie when they refuse to unflinchingly describe what happened.

This was not an attack on Christianity. It was a calculated terrorist attack on black parishioners at Emanuel A.M.E. Church by a white racist young man. Do not blather about mental illness or speculate that the killer was on drugs. Do not paint him as an outlier. Do not disconnect this racism and this violence from the less graphic but still racist violence of segregated neighborhoods, hyper-policed communities, needless voting restrictions, and attacks on public-sector jobs.

But instead of candor, we get obfuscation, as offered by South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley during a press conference last week. “We’ve got some grieving too. And we’ve got some pain we have to go through,” she said, through tears.

Conveniently, the Republican did not elaborate. Is it the pain of grief? Or is it African Americans’ collective pain of political disenfranchisement, economic exclusion, and mass incarceration, all of which are rooted in racism?

They lie when they ignore the echoes.

According to a survivor, Roof said: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

Said Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul in April, when announcing his campaign: “We have come to take our country back.”

Slightly milder iterations of Roof’s racism are as close as the worst of conservative talk radio, where fears of a colored menace — or perhaps a rebellion like that planned in 1822 by Emanuel A.M.E. founder and former slave Denmark Vesey — loom large.

Similar rhetoric pours from the mouths of right-wing politicians. And it is parroted by too many conservative voters, many who would insist they are not racist because they don’t use the n-word and have a black friend.

Roof wrote in his manifesto: “The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens.” The Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group, is a sponsor of “Political Cesspool,” which airs on Memphis radio.

We lie when we say never again.

I am unmoved by interracial unity marches and vigils and the unsatisfying, fleeting displays of kumbaya that follow such tragedies. Arguments over removing the Confederate flag from its place of honor miss the point. The symbols hurt, but the spirit that upholds those symbols kills. And because there is no appetite for exorcism, the demon of racism remains.

The lies dishonor the dead.

They are Susie Jackson, 87; Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45; Rev. DePayne Doctor, 49; Ethel Lance, 70; Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Myra Thompson, 59; and state Senator Clementa Pinckney, 41, a pastor of Mother Emanuel. But we will not remember their names, just as we do not remember the names of the four black girls bombed to death in 1963 in a Birmingham church by white racists.

I feel like I can have hope or honesty, but not both. The truth is that this massacre could lead America to atone for racism. In the truth lies liberation that could unshackle African Americans from the nation’s bottom rungs. But we can’t handle the truth.

We prefer to lie.